As of August 24, Adobe’s newest service for AIR application developers (codenamed Melrose) is available as a public beta. Go to http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/melrose/ to download the Melrose SDK and access the Melrose Portal to distribute your applications.

What (you may ask) is Melrose? In short, Melrose is a monetization service for developers and distributors of AIR applications. Using Adobe® Flex® Builder™ 3, Adobe® Flash Builder™ 4, or Adobe® Flash® Professional CS5, you can add try and buy functionality to your apps. You can then use Melrose to distribute your apps to multiple online stores. The Intel AppUp Center and the Adobe AIR Marketplace are the first two storefronts available in Melrose.

Melrose is a new addition to the Adobe® Flash® Platform Services, which together enable developers to add social and collaborative capabilities to applications, then distribute, track, and monetize them. See http://www.adobe.com/flashplatform/services/ for information.

Melrose helps AIR app developers with the following tasks:

Try and buyWhen you are developing an AIR application, you embed the licensing SWC in your application, then enter code to specify the price and trial periods online. You can also add try and buy functionality to existing applications.

Monetize
When customers purchase your applications, the Melrose service keeps track of the income from each of your applications. You are paid at regular intervals, typically once a month.

View analytics
Reports are available online via the Melrose Portal. In this initial release you can view information regarding revenue, active trials, expired trials and downloads. These reports collect data from everywhere you distribute your application with Melrose–not just from apps that are downloaded from the Adobe AIR Marketplace.

Use your programming skills and web design know-how to help the US government improve its websites!

Adobe is a platinum sponsor for a contest called Design for America. The goal of the contest is to show government agencies better ways to present information to the public. Winners get cash awards and will have their entries showcased at the Gov 2.0 Expo in May in Washington, DC.

Applications provide updates for many reasons, including bug fixes, security patches, and new functionality. This holds true for AIR applications as well.

Adobe ships occasional update versions of Adobe AIR. And Adobe AIR applications can take advantage of new features and bug fixes in new versions of the runtime.

Also, new versions of Adobe AIR may include updated versions of WebKit (the HTML rendering engine in AIR). This may change the behavior or appearance of HTML content in an AIR application. For example, improvements or corrections in WebKit may change the layout of HTML elements in an AIR application’s user interface.

It is important to provide an update mechanism in your application. When you update your application, the application can inform the user of the new update version. Should you need to update your application due to a change in the WebKit version included in AIR, the update mechanism will let your users know about the new version of your application.

AIR includes a update framework, which simplifies the task of managing update versions and adding appropriate user interface in your AIR application.

For more information, see “Updating AIR applications” in the AIR developer’s guides:

New property to return processor architecture

This new property (Capabilities.cpuArchitecture in flash.system) returns the processor architecture of the machine, as a string (such as “PowerPC” or “x86″).

Using these new APIs

If you want to take advantage of these new AIR 1.5.1 APIs, update your application descriptor to use the 1.5.1 namespace:

xmlns="http://ns.adobe.com/air/application/1.5.1"

If you do not need to use these new APIs, you do not need to update your application descriptor. Your application will be able to run with AIR 1.5.1 when the user updates the version of the runtime installed on their system.